Black Beauty

Mar01

To celebrate World Book Day 2018, David Stuart Davies looks at one of the best-loved stories ever written.

Black Beauty (1877) is a perennial children’s
favourite, a novel that makes such an impact on the mind of a young reader that
they often return to it in later life to re-live the enjoyment of this engaging
and emotionally charged story. It is a moralistic tale of the life of a horse,
emphasising the necessity to be kind to man and beast. The author Anna Sewell
achieves this by relating the events of Black Beauty’s life in the form of
an autobiography, describing the world through the eyes of the creature. In
taking this anthropomorphic approach, Sewell broke new literary ground and her
effective storytelling ability makes it very easy for the reader to accept the
premise that a horse is recounting the exploits in the narrative.

The original title was Black Beauty, his grooms and companions; the autobiography of a horse, Translated
from the original equine by Anna Sewell. The story, as narrated from Black Beauty's perspective, provided
contemporary readers with an insight into how horses suffered through their use
by human beings in the nineteenth century. Feminist writer Tess Coslett
observed that the horses in the text clearly exhibit human characteristics and
emotions such as love and loyalty. Coslett emphasises that Black Beauty
is a novel that ‘allows the reader to slide in and out of horse-consciousness,
blurring the human/animal divide.’

The plot is a simple one. The gentle thoroughbred, Black
Beauty, is raised with care and is treated well until a vicious groom injures
him. The damaged creature is then sold to various masters at whose hands he
experiences cruelty and neglect. After many unpleasant episodes, including one
where he becomes a painfully overworked cab horse in London, Black Beauty finally
canters towards a happy ending. Although Anna Sewell's
classic is set firmly in the Victorian period, its message is universal and
timeless: animals will serve humans well if they are treated with consideration
and kindness.

Sewell
maintained that she did not write the story for children. She stressed
that her purpose in writing the novel was ‘to induce kindness, sympathy, and an
understanding treatment of horses’Throughout
the book, Sewell rails against animal maltreatment. For example she describes
the pain and discomfort brought about by the ‘bearing rein’ which was designed
to go over the horse’s head and be attached to the bit
in the animal’s mouth. It was used to prevent the horse from lowering its head
beyond a fixed point. As Ginger, one of the horses in the novel, states, ‘...
it is dreadful... your neck aching until you don’t know how to bear it... it’s
hurt my tongue and my jaw and the blood from my tongue covered the froth that
kept flying from my lips’. Similarly, the use of blinkers was decried by the
author as well as certain veterinary procedures such as cutting off the tails
of the horses.

During
the course of the novel we follow Black Beauty's fluctuating fortunes,
with his various owners, both kind and gentle as well as inconsiderate and
cruel. Young readers can easily make the leap from horse-human relationships to
human-human relationships, and begin to understand how their own consideration
of others may be a benefit to all.

Sewell sold her story to Jarrold and Son for the single
fee of just £20. The novel was an immediate success. Within two years of its
publication one million copies of Black Beauty were in circulation in
the United States alone. It is one of the best-selling books of all time.

In addition to its immediate popularity, the novel achieved
the status of a political tool for animal rights activists who would distribute
copies of the novel to horse drivers and to people in stables to bring to their
attention the cruelty of their practises. It was claimed that the book gave a
dramatic boost to the newly formed RSPCA. The depiction of the ‘bearing rein’
spurred so much outrage and empathy from readers that its use was not only
abolished towards the end of the nineteenth century, but public interest in
anti-cruelty legislation in the United States also grew significantly. The
impact of the novel is still very much recognised today. Writing in the Encyclopedia
of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, Bernard Unti calls Black Beauty
‘the most influential anti-cruelty novel of all time’.

The book has been adapted for the cinema and television
several times. The first movie version was a silent production in 1917. So
successful was this film that it was re-released in 1929. The first talkie was
produced in 1946 by Twentieth Century Fox. Since then there have been three
more cinematic versions of Anna Sewell’s tale, the latest being a 1994
production with a starry British cast including Sean Bean, David Thewlis, Jim
Carter, Peter Davison and Alan Cumming, who provided the voice of Black Beauty.

There have also been various television productions
including the popular series, The
Adventures of Black Beauty (1972-74). This ran for fifty two episodes but
was not an adaptation of the book but rather a ‘continuation’ of the
story featuring new characters created by Ted Willis. The series was
widely acclaimed for its high production values and the quality of writing and
acting, and at times had remarkable English gothic overtones for a children’s
series.

The book has even been
adapted for the stage. In 2011 playwright James Stone created a live
drama which was performed at the Broughton Hall Estate, North Yorkshire and
Epsom Racecourse, Surrey. The production was a critical success and was
performed around the UK in 2012.

Black Beauty was Anna Sewell’s
only novel and sadly she did not live long enough to enjoy the full success and
respect it attained. She died, only five months after it was published. Her
birthplace in Church Plain, Great Yarmouth, is now a museum.
The novel, which has never been out of print, remains a firm favourite,
especially with young readers.